Curtain Falling on American Democracy

by Neil Godfrey

Many of you have read historian Christopher R. Browning‘s essay, The Suffocation of Democracy or at least Chauncey Devega’s interview with him about the essay on sites like Salon or Alternet. Many American readers will be very familiar with what follows. I found it helpful to set out these notes from Browning’s essay and I have (mostly) resisted temptations to intersperse them with any further commentary of my own.

Browning acknowledges broad parallels between what is happening in the United States today with her domestic and foreign courses in the 1920s, and even with 1930s Germany. But the differences are also stark, so stark and dramatic that it is easy to underestimate the seriousness of what is happening in the United States since Obama’s presidency and now under Trump. History rarely repeats, but it does echo and rhyme.

Comparing Foreign Policy

1920s:

US was isolationist; shunned League of Nations.

High tariffs crippled international trade.

Dramatic increase in “income disparity and concentration of wealth at the top”

“Congress and the courts eschewed regulations to protect against the self-inflicted calamities of free enterprise run amok”

Today, President Trump seems intent on withdrawing the US from the entire post–World War II structure of interlocking diplomatic, military, and economic agreements and organizations that have preserved peace, stability, and prosperity since 1945. His preference for bilateral relations, conceived as zero-sum rivalries in which he is the dominant player and “wins,” overlaps with the ideological preference of Steve Bannon and the so-called alt-right for the unfettered self-assertion of autonomous, xenophobic nation-states—in short, the pre-1914 international system. That “international anarchy” produced World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Great Depression, the fascist dictatorships, World War II, and the Holocaust, precisely the sort of disasters that the post–World War II international system has for seven decades remarkably avoided.

I sat in school learning about those post WW2 structures understanding that they were designed to prevent the a repeat of the chaos of the 30s and 40s. I had naively assumed we all knew the reasons for them and would never think of abandoning them.

Gravediggers of Democracy

Hindenburg

Hindenberg had been elected president in 1925 and given emergency powers to defend German democracy in the event of any crisis.

Enter the Great Depression and the “hyperpolarization of German politics”.

Hindenberg began appointing chancellors “who ruled by decree rather than through parliamentary majorities”, given the impossibility of forming ruling majorities in the fractured political landscape. Enter the appointment of Hitler.

The traditional conservatives believed they would by able to easily control the popular Hitler. And at the beginning they were getting all they could hope for and much more:

military rearmament

banning of the Communist Party

the suspension of freedom of speech,

….. the press,

….. and assembly

….. and then of parliamentary government itself,

a purge of the civil service,

and the abolition of independent labor unions.

Paul von Hindenburg had been given powers to protect democracy but abused them so that he saw the end of democracy in Germany.

Browning suggests some sort of analogy with U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

On February 13, 2016, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died. Later that day, McConnell issued a statement indicating that the U.S. Senate would not consider any Supreme Court nominee put forth by President Barack Obama to fill Justice Scalia’s vacated seat. “‘The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president,’” McConnell said. On March 16, 2016, President Obama nominated Merrick Garland, a Judge of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, to the Supreme Court. Under McConnell’s leadership, Senate Republicans refused to take any action on the Garland nomination. Garland’s nomination expired on January 3, 2017, with the end of the 114th Congress. In January 2017, Republican President Donald Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch to fill the Court vacancy; Gorsuch’s nomination was confirmed on April 7, 2017. (Wikipedia)

If the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell. He stoked the hyperpolarization of American politics to make the Obama presidency as dysfunctional and paralyzed as he possibly could. As with parliamentary gridlock in Weimar, congressional gridlock in the US has diminished respect for democratic norms, allowing McConnell to trample them even more. Nowhere is this vicious circle clearer than in the obliteration of traditional precedents concerning judicial appointments. Systematic obstruction of nominations in Obama’s first term provoked Democrats to scrap the filibuster for all but Supreme Court nominations. Then McConnell’s unprecedented blocking of the Merrick Garland nomination required him in turn to scrap the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations in order to complete the “steal” of Antonin Scalia’s seat and confirm Neil Gorsuch. The extreme politicization of the judicial nomination process is once again on display in the current Kavanaugh hearings.

Result: judiciary can only be appointed when President and Senate belong to same party. Hence separation of powers (executive, judiciary, legislative) is in jeopardy.

Trump’s personal “idiosyncracies” do not detract from the benefits of his rule for those who have made their alliance with him:

huge tax cuts for the wealthy,

McConnell

financial and environmental deregulation,

the nominations of two conservative Supreme Court justices (so far) and a host of other conservative judicial appointments,

and a significant reduction in government-sponsored health care . . .

Like Hitler’s conservative allies, McConnell and the Republicans have prided themselves on the early returns on their investment in Trump.

Inversion of Previous Political Orientations

Hitler and Mussolini were allowed to take power largely as a consequence of the virulent divisions of the leftist parties:

The Catholic parties . . . liberal moderates, Social Democrats, and Communists did not cooperate effectively in defense of democracy. In Germany this reached the absurd extreme of the Communists underestimating the Nazis as a transitory challenge while focusing on the Social Democrats—dubbed “red fascists”—as the true long-term threat to Communist triumph.

By 1936 in France and Spain

the democratic forces . . . had learned the painful lesson of not uniting against the fascist threat. . . . In France the prospect of a Popular Front victory and a new government headed by—horror of horrors—a Socialist and Jew, Léon Blum, led many on the right to proclaim, “Better Hitler than Blum.”

We are familiar with the Trump lines of defence:

First: claim there was no collusion; the claim is a hoax

Second: collusion is not a crime; Russia’s meddling had no effect

Browning expresses his suspicion that if Mueller does find Trump guilty of criminal conspiracy many Republicans will implicitly or explicitly retreat to the third line of defence:

Third: Better Putin than Hillary

There seems to be nothing for which the demonization of Hillary Clinton does not serve as sufficient justification, and the notion that a Trump presidency indebted to Putin is far preferable to the nightmare of a Clinton victory will signal the final Republican reorientation to illiberalism at home and subservience to an authoritarian abroad.

But It’s Not the Same — No Need for a Totalitarian Takeover

Perhaps the most apt designation of this new authoritarianism is the insidious term “illiberal democracy.” Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary have all discovered that opposition parties can be left in existence and elections can be held in order to provide a fig leaf of democratic legitimacy, while in reality elections pose scant challenge to their power. Truly dangerous opposition leaders are neutralized or eliminated one way or another.

And Trump has never hidden his admiration for those leaders.

No Need for State Control

Total control of the press and other media is likewise unnecessary, since a flood of managed and fake news so pollutes the flow of information that facts and truth become irrelevant as shapers of public opinion. Once-independent judiciaries are gradually dismantled through selective purging and the appointment of politically reliable loyalists. Crony capitalism opens the way to a symbiosis of corruption and self-enrichment between political and business leaders. Xenophobic nationalism (and in many cases explicitly anti-immigrant white nationalism) as well as the prioritization of “law and order” over individual rights are also crucial to these regimes in mobilizing the popular support of their bases and stigmatizing their enemies.

Add Electoral Distortions to Allow Tyranny by the Minority

With the Democratic Party’s constituency weighted in the big states and big cities.

Each Democrat Senator represents ca 3.65 million;

Each Republican Senator represents ca 2.51 million.

As for the coming mid-term elections offering some hope for change….

With gerrymandering and voter suppression enhancing even more the systemic Republican advantage, it is estimated that the Democrats will have to win by 7 to 11 points (a margin only obtainable in rare “wave” elections) in the 2018 elections to achieve even the narrowest of majorities in the House of Representatives.

The Supreme Court is not helping.

Given the Supreme Court’s

undermining of central provisions of the Voting Rights Act (Shelby County v. Holder),

its refusal to take up current flagrant gerrymandering cases (Gill v. Whitford for Wisconsin; Benisek v. Lamone for Maryland),

and its recent approval of the Ohio law purging its voting rolls (Husted v. Randolph Institute),

it must be feared that the Court will in the future open the floodgates for even more egregious gerrymandering and voter suppression.

The unprecedented flow of dark money into closely contested campaigns has distorted the electoral process even further. The Supreme Court decision declaring corporations to be people and money to be free speech (Citizens United v. FEC) in particular has greatly enhanced the ability of corporations and wealthy individuals to influence American politics.

The 1970’s Turning Point

I think it happened in 1983 in Australia. I still “remember where I was” when hearing a Labor! government talk about the “need” for Australia to get in line with other countries and deregulate banking, labour relations, this and that and all the relative social and economic equality and securities we had had since the War. Sorry — I promised to keep my own commentary out of this post.

To consolidate his dictatorship, Hitler had to abolish the independent unions in Germany in a single blow. Trump faces no such problem. In the first three postwar decades, workers and management effectively shared the increased wealth produced by the growth in productivity. Since the 1970s that social contract has collapsed, union membership and influence have declined, wage growth has stagnated, and inequality in wealth has grown sharply. . . . The increasingly uneven playing field caused by the rise in corporate influence and decline in union power, along with the legions of well-funded lobbyists, is another sign of the illiberal trend.

No Need to Shut Down the Free Press

Upon his appointment as chancellor, Hitler immediately created a new Ministry of People’s Enlightenment and Propaganda under Joseph Goebbels, who remained one of his closest political advisers.

Hannity

In Trump’s presidency, those functions have effectively been privatized in the form of Fox News and Sean Hannity. Fox faithfully trumpets the “alternative facts” of the Trump version of events, and in turn Trump frequently finds inspiration for his tweets and fantasy-filled statements from his daily monitoring of Fox commentators and his late-night phone calls with Hannity. The result is the creation of a “Trump bubble” for his base to inhabit that is unrecognizable to viewers of PBS, CNN, and MSNBC and readers of The Washington Post and The New York Times. The highly critical free media not only provide no effective check on Trump’s ability to be a serial liar without political penalty; on the contrary, they provide yet another enemy around which to mobilize the grievances and resentments of his base. A free press does not have to be repressed when it can be rendered irrelevant and even exploited for political gain.

Human Rights

It would be obscene to compare Hitler’s agendas with respect to race, homosexuality, mentally and physically handicapped persons, abortion and reproductive rights with what is happening today in the United States. Nonetheless, it does appear that we can expect to see ongoing discrimination against gays, an end to affirmative action programs, a winding back of abortion rights. Further,

And equal protection of voting rights is likely to be eroded in red states through ever more insidiously designed voter suppression laws and gerrymandering once the Supreme Court makes clear that it will not intervene to curb such measures.

History Sometimes Winds Backwards

How many of us still believe in the inevitability of progress towards greater emancipation, equality and freedom?

We began with reference to foreign policy. Once again we see the spectre of trade wars.

Escalating trade wars could easily tip the world economy into decline, and the Trump administration has set thresholds for peaceful settlements with Iran and North Korea that seem well beyond reach.

It is possible that Trump is engaged in excessive rhetorical posturing as a bargaining chip and will retreat to more moderate positions in both cases. But it is also possible that adversarial momentum will build, room for concessions will disappear, and he will plunge the country into serious economic or military conflicts as a captive of his own rhetoric. Historically, such confrontations and escalations have often escaped the control of leaders far more talented than Trump.

And After Trump?

We will still have

a highly politicized judiciary

racial division

cultural conflict

political polarization

gerrymandering

voter suppression

uncontrolled campaign spending

growing income disparity

And decades hence?

Finally, within several decades after Trump’s presidency has ended, the looming effects of ecological disaster due to human-caused climate change—which Trump not only denies but is doing so much to accelerate—will be inescapable. Desertification of continental interiors, flooding of populous coastal areas, and increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, with concomitant shortages of fresh water and food, will set in motion both population flight and conflicts over scarce resources that dwarf the current fate of Central Africa and Syria. No wall will be high enough to shelter the US from these events.

(To conclude with a comment gleaned from another article, capitalism will be responsible for ecological destruction, and only with that horrific consequence will capitalism itself likely finally end. Marx was hopelessly optimistic.)

Browning sees the next two elections, 2018 and 2020, as indicators of whether we can pull back before it’s too late.

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Bush had his two terms and faded into obscurity. American democracy was fine. Trump will have his one or two terms, and then be consigned to the dustbin of history. I think American democracy will be just fine and plug along as always. Those are my thoughts, anyway. I find that the left tends to get a little overly paranoid (e.g., Captain Paranoia Sam Harris).

Yeah, I think he’s over dramatizing the situation. It seems that every problem has to be an apocalyptic threat to our way of life and even our civilization. And i agree that Sam Harris is an examplar of this approach.

Robert Michels (1911) argued that all organizations, even those in theory most egalitarian and most committed to democracy are in fact oligarchical, and dominated by a small group of leadership. I find this to be true of the United States “Democratic Party” (a political party organization).

Thus the nuance of the slogan “I’d rather be a Russian than a Democrat(ic :-)” has some arguable merit.

However many of the people promoting the “un-American” slogan do not do nuance, and also fail to understand the nuance of the slogan “Black Lives Matter”.

“Aye up! This looks like straight up Argumentum ad Hitlerum. ” thinks I. Browses SC decisions and processes in confirmation hearings… “Yup, Browning as cited is talking out of his arse, I can dismiss this out of hand.”

Whether it is Jesus or Justices, I apply the same epistemology. Lo and behold, I discover a similar kind of crank arrived at by similar crank reasoning. You will win no arguments taking your audience for damned fools. If you start out claiming they are possessed by Satan or a Nazi (Equally, fundie or Commies), they are simply going to stop listening. Somewhere later there might be a perfectly good argument and good reason for someone to support what you are saying; but they will never hear it and never know – you have insulted them and their intelligence and they will have walked away in disgust.

Browning was pointing out that those who compare what is happening in the US with Hitler and the rise of fascism are misinformed.

I attempted to make clear his argument that what is happening in the United States in recent years is NOT as per Hitler or Nazism. It is an instructive contrast and comparison. Hitler took direct control of the media; Trump has not.

Sorry Neil, it didn’t survive the first skim. I checked a couple of things, stopped reading, and clicked away to something more profitable. I’m glad you were arguing the contrary but that wasn’t immediately clear to me.

All the above posters are probably Americans who think the Republican party is a normal mainstream political party. Americans don’t realize how batshit crazy Republicans are compared to other countries. It’s really bizarre to me how many “apologists” for the Republican party I come across in supposed “rational skeptic” forums and websites. We’re going through strange times.

• The United States is in practice a two-party system that dominates the government. Likely enabled by the first-past-the-post voting method.

The Democratic Party is just as foolish as Republican Party, in the sense that neither party will move to eliminate the dominance of the two-party system. They are the Victor Frankenstein that created the monster Republican Party.

Per “Chris Hedges Discusses America“. C-SPAN.org. 8 September 2018.
Hedges opines that Bill and Hillary Clinton betrayed the American proletariat, while comparing Trump to Balkans politicians (time 13:37–15:32). Hedges notes the similarity of the political style of Donald Trump with that of Radovan Karadžić and Slobodan Milošević.

Sadly, both of The Two Parties of the USA (as if having two and only two parties was enshrined in our Constitution) are tripping over each other trying to prove to the donor class of oligarchs that they are the ones who can best be trusted to control and squeeze the working classes. The Overton Window of tolerated political discourse here has been veering rightward with alarming speed over the past few decades.

Democrats are pretty much what used to be called moderate Republicans. Now, the Republicans are just off the spectrum. They have been correctly described by leading conservative commentators, like Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, as just what they call a radical insurgency, which has abandoned parliamentary politics.

What I found ironical, even “astonishing”(?), is how our focus on the mainstream media as a direct threat to an informed public and, hence, genuine democracy, blinded us to the far greater threat — that the mainstream media would be effectively sidelined and demonized as the “enemy of the people” by a minority of constituents who hold the executive, judicial and legislative power.

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